Undoing of a Lady [Paperback]

This is the final part of a hilarious trilogy of romances set in the fictional Yorkshire village of Fortune's Folly.

All three are set about five years after the same author's novel "Unmasked" the events of which took place in 1804 and also in Yorkshire. Many of the characters in that book reappear in the three books in the "Brides of Fortune" series. IMHO it enhances the reader's enjoyment of this trilogy to read all four books in sequence.

In other words I would recommend that potential readers should read "Unmasked" first, treating this trilogy as the second, third and fourth part of a quartet, which would therefore consist of:

1) "Unmasked"
2) "The Confessions of a Duchess (Brides of Fortune)"
3) "The Scandals of an Innocent (Brides of Fortune)"
4) "The Undoing of a Lady"

The pretext of the "Brides of Fortune" trilogy is that the obnoxious and greedy squire of Fortune's Folly, Sir Montague Fortune, discovers that the village was not covered when a whole range of ancient medieval laws were repealed in the seventeenth century. And that he can reactivate them, claiming outdated and absurd feudal dues.

In particular, Sir Montague reactivates something called the "Dames Tax" whereby any unmarried heiress in the village must pay him half her fortune. Under the terms of the tax, every widow or maid in Fortune's Folly who has or stands to inherit any property must marry within a year or pay half of it to Sir Montague.

Needless to say, this infuriates the women of Fortune's Folly, particularly the sinngle ones with any money: and it also causes them to look around for possible husbands, making the village into "a veritable marriage mart." And needless to say, all the male fortune hunters in England, from impecunious aristocrats who need money to maintain a bankrupt estate to young men on the make, flock to Fortune's Folly in the hopes of snaring a wealthy bride.

Ironically, one of the female residents most affected by this ridiculous tax is Sir Montague's own half-sister, Lady Elizabeth Scarlet, who inherited a modest fortune from her father, the previous Earl of Scarlet. Elizabeth is a golden hearted but somewhat wild young lady, who often gets into silly scrapes, or worse, gets her friends into them. For example. Elizabeth was the real culprit when one of her madcap ideas caused her friend Alice Lister terrible embarrassment in the previous book in the series, "The Scandals of an Innocent".

Elizabeth has been extremely close since she was a girl to Nathaniel Waterhouse, who has the courtesy title of Earl of Waterhouse and is the son and heir of the Duke of Waterhouse.

PEDANT ALERT: let me get off my chest at this point that one of the mistakes in this trilogy and many of Nicola Cornick's other books is that the Dukedoms in her stories have titles which match the family surname. There isn't a single Duke in the British peerage whose family surname is identical to the title: all the English Dukes take their title from a place, usually a county or county town. One Scottish Dukedom is almost an exception - both because the title is part of the surname, and because the town of Hamilton is named for the family whose head is the Duke of Hamilton, rather than the other way around - but even in this case, thanks to a dynastic alliance hundreds of years ago, the family surname has all that time been Douglas-Hamilton.

Elizabeth thinks she regards Nat Waterhouse as a friend, but when he got engaged to Miss Flora Minchin in the previous book she was consumed with jealousy: several of her friends commented that she was obviously in love with him.

This book begins the night before Nat and Flora are due to be married. Elizabeth, who has convinced herself that Nat is making a mistake by contracting a loveless marriage for financial reasons, decides to "kidnap" him so that he misses the wedding. But her scheme goes disastrously wrong ...

Meanwhile, romantic intrigues are not the only story in this trilogy - there is also an ongoing murder investigation. Lord Liverpool, the Home Secretary, saw the the host of young men travelling to the village in seach of a wealthy bride as the perfect cover for a covert investigation into a suspect death.

Liverpool suspected that Sir William Crosby, a local magistrate who had been shot in what appeared to be a hunting accident, may have been murdered by local criminals to whose nefarious activities he was getting too close. And three of the "Guardians" - a (fictional) group who investigate crimes for the Home Office - were young single men who have inherited serious debt problems from profligate parents. These three: Dexter Anstruther (The Confessions of a Duchess (Brides of Fortune)), Lord Miles Vickery (The Scandals of an Innocent (Brides of Fortune)), and Nat Waterhouse (this book) are the heroes of the three "Brides of Fortune" books.

Liverpool orders our three heroes to go to Fortune's Folly on the pretext of looking for a bride, and to investigate Sir William Crosby's death while they are about it. And that's how Lady Elizabeth's childhood friend Nat Waterhouse, comes to be in the village - not just looking for a wife, but for a murderer as well!

During the first two books, Nat and his colleagues investigated first the murder of Sir William Crosby, then that of Warren Sampson who they suspected of the killing but was murdered himself. At the start of this final book it appears that the Guardians have finished their work in Fortune's Folly and can concentrate on finding a bride (in Nat's case) or making a home with the brides they married in the first two books (in Dexter's and Miles' cases.)

But then the most hated person in Fortune's Folly is killed and the Guardians have an even more difficult mystery to solve, because practically the entire village had a motive for the murder ...

This book, and indeed the whole trilogy, is quite ridiculous, often funny, distinctly sexy, and highly entertaining. It definately is not Georgette Heyer, let alone Jane Austen. But neither does it read like an insipid attempt to copy their work for a lowbrow audience, a pitfall which all too many modern attempts at a regency romance fall into.

If you are looking for a light-hearted romance to relax with, without making too much of an intellectual demand on the brain and with few pretensions to detailed historical accuracy, this trilogy is very good fun, and on those terms I can recommend it.

This was my first time reading Nicola Cornick books, I found it thoroughly enjoyable, very entertaining to read and had a silly smirk on my face at times. I found the book well written and will certainly be reading more, next one already in front of me to start.

Getting tangled up in fantasies about a man Joy saw maybe five or six times a year was ridiculous.

And it wasn't as if Gray ever encouraged her. He remembered her name, but that was as far as it ever got. Well, except in her dreams. In real life, however, the attraction was totally one sided.

Or so she thought. Joy couldn't believe it when her daydreams about Grayson Bennett, political consultant and heartthrob extraordinaire, seemed poised to become reality. When he noticed her - really noticed her. When he gazed at her with the same desire he'd inspired in her for years. But was sweet, small-town Joy a match for big-city Gray, ruthless about all things- including opening his heart?